DMN's Evan Grant votes for Michael Young as AL MVP

That's not an answer Dick. If you really believe that both are equally important, I don't know what to tell.

I'm not at all saying that the analytical skills are worthless, but that you just need to have a baseline understanding to do your job. Not a PhD.

If you can't do the other stuff, there is no reason for a newspaper to hire you because tons of people can sit at home and dissect stats for free.

 

I wouldn't expect any beat writer to "calculate WAR". But I'd definitely expect they understand why it's important and what it--and other statistics, for that matter--can (or can't) tell them about the game. Making it a stats vs. eyes debate misses the point. The statheads don't love stats just because the love numbers and math, but because the good statistics can tell us meaningful information about the performance of players. Likewise, they recognize--often much more than the mainstream media and broadcasters--that bad statistics can tell us misleading information about the performance of players. As a reader, I want the beat writer to use all of the available sources of meaningful information and analysis--which includes statistics--when providing coverage of the game.

I don't think it's too much to ask for a reporter to possess the ability to understand how to use those tools to aid in analysis in addition to writing and reporting. And I would hope reporters want to. Most people don't go into journalism to serve as stenographers for other people, do they?

 

If you don't understand the ins and outs of your beat, then you are worthless to me.

A football beat writer should be able to talk fluently about various offensive and defensive schemes. And the salary cap.

A business beat writer should be able to understand high finance.

A baseball beat writer better understand sabermetrics. If not, there's the door.

You don't even have to agree with them. In fact, I want you to be skeptical, as with anything. But the teams use them. The fans use them. You better use them, too. Or at least understand them and how they are used.

No number of pithy clubhouse quotes makes up for a gaping hole in your understanding of your beat. (And, yes, I understand that there is much more to breaking news and developing sources than just harvesting clubhouse quotes.)

 

WAR is cited as the objective standard. There are three different ways of calculating WAR. Doesn't that alone indicate that it is also a subjective measurement based on what the creators think is more important to winning baseball games?

Put another way: We would all be able to say who the top 5-10 players in the league are, by our "eyes" or observations. WAR promoters and sabermetricians say it is a useful but imperfect tool -- in other words, it can put guys in a group but shouldn't be used as the singular definition of who is the third-best player and who is the sixth-best player in that group. So if someone else has the group basically correct and orders the players differently within it, how is that any different than what the three WAR measurements do themselves?

 

The vast majority of fans could not give a shit about WAR. I'm not even sure there's a 50 percent of fandom that chitchats about OPS with fellow fans. Hanging around here gives one a distorted view of what most of fandom really cares about. The vast majority of fans mostly care about how far that tater went, how that pitcher blew away that batter or couldn't find the plate, or wow, did you see that catch? Analyzing why any team would pay Juan Pierre is not super high up there, I'm afraid.

 

Now I think we're getting into semantics. Dick has said you'd better "understand" sabermetrics, and I agree. He said you can't have "a gaping hole" in your understanding of the sports. I agree.

We're not talking about people who are totally clueless. I think the overall results of the award voting past five years has showed that writers do have a pretty good understanding of this stuff.

One guy voted for Michael Young, and he gave a perfectly reasonable explanation.

20 people voted for Ryan Braun over Matt Kemp, and I think that's also perfectly reasonable, depending how much value you place on the context of the performance (ie being in a pennant race vs out).

Look at Mark Trumbo. He hit 30 hrs and had nearly 100 RBIs and he didn't sniff the ROY.

 

You hit on the two major problems with many of these advanced statistics -- they are not as objective as the statheads claim and there is quite a bit of room for debate if they actually measure what they claim to measure.

 

"Advanced" stats might not be perfect, but even their imperfect versions may be optimal to other forms of analysis. That is, just because statheads disagree about which of the three WAR calculations is best, it doesn't mean all three of them are not better anything else we have.

And, of course, any ranking system is going to be biased toward the underlying values the creator thinks are most important. Changing just the weightings of the inputs into an equation can obviously shift it. Part of the goal of most statheads, though, is to determine through dispassionate analysis which of those inputs into ranking systems like WAR are the most important part of winning a baseball games. Those that reject statistical analysis often show no interest in evaluating whether the values they think are important to winning baseball games actually are.

 

It's no wonder the most engaged--and most valuable to advertisers--readers have flocked to websites that provide them with thoughtful analysis and commentary given the disdain many of you have for the readers of your newspapers.

 

Noted.

Now, to the thread title and the matter at hand: "Prove" that Michael Young was not the most valuable player in the American League, as many posters appear to believe they are doing by citing WAR. Hypothetically speaking, if someone believes late & close is ignored in WAR formulas and is the best way to evaluate a player, is that person wrong?

 

I really think some people would rather watch general managers go over spreadsheets than watch players play actual baseball. And no, there is not one universal number that will predict how many wins someone will mean to his team. Too many humans (who presumably aren't robots) are involved

 

To be honest, most web sites that make money program toward the folks that like to click on galleries of the 100 hottest cheerleaders.